Millets Harvest: Unveiling Agriculture Sustainability Impact

Abstract

Sustainability of agriculture is the utmost requirement for every country as it protects the environment, expands the earth natural base, and maintains soil fertility without compromising the needs of the future generation. Agriculture’s sustainability relies on economic, social, and environmental dimensions. Millets, in the recent era, have been gaining attention as they are considered highly sustainable crops because they are drought-resistant, requiring less water and emitting lesser greenhouse gases compared with other crops. This study analyses the impact of ecological parameters of agriculture sustainability, i.e. per capita CO2 emissions, average monthly temperature, and precipitation on the annual yield of millets in India from 2004 to 2019. The empirical findings of the time series analysis using Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) for short-run and long nexus between the climate factors and millet yield and stability test have been covered, and to check the stability of the model Cumulative Sum of Residuals (CUSUM) and Cumulative Sum of Square of Residuals (CUSUMSQ) have been used, which shows a strong relationship among the variables of the study. The results showed that the per capita CO2 has a positive impact on the yield of millets. However, the average mean temperature negatively and significantly affects the output level of millets. The negative impact of rising average mean temperature was strong and it reduced the total yield of millets by 5% in the short-run while the impact was found to be weakly negative in the long-run. Hence, to increase the production of millets in India efforts should be made to control the average mean temperature, which is the biggest challenge for developing countries like India.

Keywords: Agriculture Sustainability, Millets, GDP, Climate Change, CO2 Emission

View PDF